In the Internet domain, merchants of goods and services have relied primarily to date on so-called banner advertising to promote their name and increase awareness. This form of advertising is rapidly falling out of favor both because it is relatively ineffective and is not available in many social forums where advertisers may wish to establish a presence. Social networking sites help foster brand awareness through increased communications and serve as a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns. However, many of these social networking sites, such as Facebook, allow only a small percentage of an interface to present advertising to a user. The situation is even more restricted in mobile applications, as device displays are smaller, and users are not keen to share limited viewing space with undesirable advertising.
Thus, in the next phase of digital marketing, brands may no longer have special boxes (ad units). For example, Facebook recently announced that it is allowing advertisers to post in a mobile news feed, where they have been identified to have the greatest engagement rate.
Merchants, therefore, must create or utilize other means for engaging with users which permit them to present relevant and interesting content. However, to do so on a massive scale is challenging given that advertisers, historically, have not focused on creating large amounts of content, and did not have effective tools for doing so. Moreover many merchants/brands have been reluctant to engage with their customers except with carefully controlled and vetted messages that are inherently created in a slow, deliberate fashion.
In addition, another limitation of traditional banner advertising is frequently the lack of flexibility or adaptability to new information, such as news, events, changing interests of their audience, etc. Advertisements rapidly become stale and do not adapt well to context changes associated with a brand audience.
These and other limitations of current brand advertising are addressed in the present disclosure.